


Kill me and live with the memory (tell the world you won)

by Evelyn_fireheart



Series: when you glance back and see [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, I love him, If you comment on this as starker I will fucking destroy you, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Peter Parker Deserved Better, Peter Parker is a Little Shit, Peter Parker is a self-sacrificing idiot, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, tony stark is a father figure, yeah i went there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 10:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21444643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evelyn_fireheart/pseuds/Evelyn_fireheart
Summary: Tony Stark is no longer a warrior. He is no longer spry and fit and filled with the kind of resilience and fire only  youth can give. Time and pain does that to a person.But Peter had been. He had been strong and kind and perfect, and there's little Tony wouldn't give to have him back. There's little Queens as a whole wouldn't give, if only to have a familiar, trustworthy hero back. The people of Queens had never doubted that Spider-man would fight for them, but they would always doubt the Avengers.Of course, they were right to.The Avengers no longer existed- Iron Man was a thing of the past, and the rest had dissipated amongst the wind and sea. Spiderman would have fought for them. Peter Parker would have fought for them.This is nothing more than proof. Every punch thrown and life saved, every unhesitating decision made only serves to prove that Peter is a hero, that Queens was right. Even though he didn't truly have the right to, Tony wished they weren't.He wished that they might have been wrong, that Peter could -for once- be a coward.A coward wouldn't sacrifice their life for the universe.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: when you glance back and see [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1494989
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	Kill me and live with the memory (tell the world you won)

It's at once the loudest thing in the universe, and the quietest. The battlefield is still alight with war around them, and screams mix with the sounds of shots firing, but Tony knows as he watches that there will never be anything as significant, as _devastating_, as this.

Tony has never grieved a child twice before. He knows that’s what happening now. Before, it was simpler. He lost his child. Had another one. Pepper stored up a reservoir of grief and resentment and then buried it beneath a dam they both knew wasn’t strong enough. Tony lost himself to his work, then to his grief, and then to himself. 

Tony has always been hopeless, as soon as that sarcastic teenager had walked into his life with a smile dripping sunshine. Now he was unrecognisable. 

Pepper was reduced to a shell of a woman by her grief, all business and calm rage and smiles laced with love that had no where left to go. (_Many don’t know this, and many who do forget, but Virginia Potts had loved Parker too. It was born of understanding and of fondness assigned by default at first, and later developed into an unusual mix of friend, boss and mother. _

_Pepper had loved Peter more than she’d ever loved anyone that wasn’t her mother, Rhodey or Tony.)_

Morgan fought against them with every beat of her young, raging heart. She screams and wails and protests every inch of every day, fighting against the injustices her parents were dealing her. Peter would’ve been so, so proud.

It is that which kicks him into gear. Peter would be disappointed in him, would think him destructive and selfish and, if it weren’t for the kindness that opposed his sense of righteous justice, he would fight against Tony himself.

So Tony grieves properly. It’s not painless, or easy, but it’s a start, and eventually even Pepper drags herself out of bed with a weak voice and a weaker smile. It gives Tony the strength to stay upright.

When she twists her lips in that signature way of hers, the way that challenges and humours and loves with every inch, it feels like forgiveness. There is still guilt drowning him, for a million mistakes and should-have-beens, but there is no uncertainty left that he will be alone through it. There is always Pepper, reaching under the waves with a loving hand, to make sure his head is above the water.

But this...

This is a different kind of grief- Tony knows it and his child isn't even dead yet. (Again.)

He doesn't know if Pepper will be able to save him this time.

* * *

They officially get married a year and a half after the snap. It's a huge affair, with most of the worlds press (that survived) there. It's a boost to the public, to see their heroes healing and continuing with their lives. Pepper wears a white dress that has a train the length of the aisle, and the venue is decorated with bursting bouquets of flowers and flowing ribbons.

Morgan is there, but she only crawls about for a little while, enough to get photos taken of her. She looks adorable in her dusk pink dress, and spends the time either staring up at people with the same irritated disdain Pepper does, or screaming her head off.

Their guests coo over her, praising her wide brown eyes and the thick hair that curls down over her ears. They bop her nose and dance her around, laughing lightly all the while. 

Morgan hates it. By the time her necessary time is over she’s tired and drooping, and Tony hands her to Happy with a kiss to her brow and a whispered apology. 

The press that attend adore the party, with compliments of their generosity being tossed around as much as the flower petals that Pepper’s niece is obsessed with. When they return to their companies, however, they make digs about how they blatantly threw around their wealth, about Pepper as the trophy wife and Tony’s choice not to have a priest ordain the wedding.

Now, unofficially, they get married a few months after Tony’s return from Titan. There is too much understanding of loss, now. There is both too much and too little to loose, with one child gone and another on the way, and the world is dying. Is there any better time for their wedding, really?

Happy marries them on their newly bought property, by the lake that they now own. They plan to redo the house there together, to design it to be a perfect mix of them so that their child has a home to call theirs.

In the privacy of Pepper’s arms, Tony admits that it could never feel truly like home. Home was Pepper and Rhodey and Happy, would one day be his daughter, but it was also Peter. Peter’s rambling and soft smile and teasing, Peter’s unending love for physical affection and irreplacable ability to see the best in people. It was just Peter. Always had been, since the first day he lay eyes on him really, and Tony knew it would be till his last.   
His hero and his inspiration. His kid. And god, he wished every moment that Peter could be there living with him. Peter would adore this new life Tony was building for himself.   
He would help them plan the wedding, would be Pepper’s assistant whenever she wanted, but would inevitably act as her family and make decisions in her stead when she got too stressed.

He would smile in that selfless way he had done far too often, and he would break his back trying to make the wedding the best it could be. And then, eventually, Tony would notice and he would’ve pulled him away with a hug and a promise of lab time, and it would be balanced.   
Peter would love their baby. Tony would insist he call them their sibling, and he would protest, but he would eventually cave. Spider-Man was the strongest man he knew, but he was also Peter Parker, and a huge softie. Fuck, Tony misses him.   
  
He’s dead. His child is dead, and there isn’t anything he can do about it. Even he knows that this kind of death is irreversible; there wasn’t even a body left to bury. He’s almost glad that May went too.   
Almost.

May had been his friend as well as his co-parent, and while Peter had taught him how to love a child -his child, May had taught him how to care for one. He owed so much to her, and missed her so much. She was nothing but memories now. Nothing but memories and photos and ash on a hospital floor.

He designs much of the lakehouse personally, alongside Pepper and with occasional additions from Rhodey. He designs two rooms completely by himself. One is his lab. It’s underground, and spans out up to the lake, and it’s one huge open-plan space. He leaves a corner of it.   
That part- it was never meant for him. He puts in a huge chalkboard as well as multiple holo-screens, and leaves it at that. Peter had customised his space at the tower with his natural chaos before. To attempt to replicate that would’ve been pointless. (Nothing can replace Peter.)

The other is Peter’s bedroom.   
The closest friends his kid had -Ned and Michelle- are dead, too. Disappeared. These days, that’s good as dead anyway so he doesn’t bother looking personally. The search he has FRIDAY run comes up negative, and he doesnt have it in him to watch the footage. He decorates the room fully out of his own memory, arranges clothes over desk chairs and sticks up Star Wars posters haphazardly as if Peter had done it himself.

When he’s done it looks like a tomb, a replica of a time that never existed. A place his son never called home. It’s a mausoleum, but Pepper calls it a monument. Part of Tony doesn’t accept that Peter won’t ever see it, won’t muss the sheets or leave clothes on the floor. Part of him never will.

When it comes to the wedding, he buys a suit in a size slightly too big for him, fitted for a body lined with hidden strength. The material is slightly stretchy at the joints. It’s for an emergency, in case something goes wrong at the ceremony and Spider-Man has to appear. The cufflinks are ports for nanotech, as if it could protect a dead man.   
The suit is hung in the closet Peter will never use, and despite every irrational wish or bargain Tony has made since that ash coated his hands, it is never worn.

Peter Parker is not at his wedding. 

Rhodey is there, as Tony’s best man, and he brings his family with him. They sit on Tony’s side, and he nearly cries when he sees Mama Rhodes again for the first time in years.

Pepper doesn’t have any bridesmaids. Instead, she walks slower than most brides, and has a bouquet full of springtime wildflowers. She dedicates then to May, the friend who’d been taken by the same slaughter that took their first child.

When Pepper’s mother questions her lack of bridesmaids, Pepper only replies with, “The only women who deserved the role is dead. To choose someone else would dishonour her, and I would not treat the memory of my dearest friend like that.”

Tony hadn’t known he could love Pepper more than he already did. Of course, Pepper just loved proving him wrong.  
  


* * *

  
For the most part, he feels detached. As if he’s part of the audience of a show he doesn’t care for, or the unwilling eavesdropper to someone else’s argument.   
It’s obvious why. He doesn’t need to be a therapist to know what it’s doing to him to see a child he’d grieved for- his child- alive and fighting again.

It’s fracturing him, even as he raises his hand again and blasts another alien. They’re still coming, but for the most part they’re held back.   
Tony doesn’t particularly care why. There’s likely fighters he doesn’t know holding them back; because all the big players are here in the epicentre of the storm.

This is the finale, the last hurrah before the heroes go home. Bitter amusement claws at his insides, but he lets it go in favour of latching onto fury instead. He uses it to fuel the attack he launches at Thanos.

With every punch and blast he feels his body ache and protest. Each twist and evasion comes a second too late due to the way time has taken a toll on him. His joints creak. His reactions are slower. More and more he is forced to rely on the suit’s AI to control his movements and fight pattern.  
  
Tony had hugged Peter once, and then the kid had flown away to help some other fighter trapped beneath the debris. He got one hug, and then the child he had mourned for for 5 years was gone. Nothing but a quick, “See you soon, Mister Stark,” and a flash of his brilliant smile.   
It had been glorious and wonderful and over far, far too soon. Now Tony’s eyes were constantly searching the battlefield for a blue of red and blue, or the silver of his web.

It doesn’t come.

Or, more to say, it comes too late.

* * *

  
Reporters, fans, loving friends and spiteful ones alike, they had all called Tony a futurist. _The_ futurist. He had spent his life chasing the heels of the future and trying to stop it, outrun it. He had caught up, now. Finally. 

Tony Stark had never been so scared. Minutes-seconds before, they had all been returned. And now-

He had never experienced a level of terror such as this, had never before felt this terrifying reality of his existence shattering apart.   
When he’d lost Peter the first time, he thought he knew what it was to grieve a child. Regardless of what anyone said, regardless of what the news _didn’t_ say, having Peter torn from his grasp had tattooed a new layer of pain into him.

After the Blip, his hands were always searching for Peter, a paragon of the past -not the future that he had always yearned for. There were things more compelling than that, after all.

And then came Morgan, and with her a new kind of fear. But this was one he saw mirrored in Pepper’s eyes, too, and so he knew it had to be understandable if not forgivable. Morgan was his in all the ways he’d once wished Peter could be, and in all the ways he still hated Howard for.

She was 7 pounds and 5 ounces, born 2 weeks late with a head full of charcoal hair already. Her eyes were as bright a blue as Pepper’s startling irises, and they already shone with a shrewd intelligence.   
  
But he had known with a deep, drowning certainty, that her eyes would turn into a rich brown, same as he knew that her hair would one day become a cascading waterfall of dark hair.  
She would one day become a Stark, and -if Tony wasn’t careful- she would one day be crushed underneath the weight of it.

This was a fear he held alone.

Tony had not been born as a Stark. It had been beaten into him by Howard and Obie and countless others, until he perfectly fit the mold made generations before. Morgan was not born as a Stark, either.

One of his greatest possible failings imaginable would be a situation where she became one.   
Tony refused to make her one, to forge her the way that Howard had him. He was not that kind of person, not that kind of _(horrible-cruel-terrible-heartless **monster**)_ parent.

But life was not always kind, and people were not always understanding. She would be affected by their treatment of her -their interpretation of her genius- as he had been by his own peers. It was inevitable, really, but Tony had wished to fight against it anyway.  
He would always want to fight against that which would hurt his child.

Most of all, he had always fought against that which hurt his _children. _Even when he failed and had been torn away from his son, he had kept going. Kept loving and caring and existing.

He could not fight this. Could not love him enough to stop him making this decision.  
  
_This_ was his child being reborn in a pit of flame and death. _This _was his child fighting monsters and aliens and Titans, and Tony allowing it. _This_ was his child choosing death over his own future, over all his possibilities and opportunities.  
  
_This_ was his child sacrificing himself for the entire damn universe.  
  


* * *

  
Tony should have known.

He should have seen it.

They all knew that the gauntlet had to be destroyed somehow, and they knew the stones had to be put back in their own times.

Peter didn’t know this, of course. He knew that the stones were dangerous, knew they were powerful due to the research he had taken part in by Tony’s side before everything.

He saw a chance to save someone’s life, and didn’t pause to question if he himself would survive. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have made a difference.   
_Just one, _Peter had said, with a heart like wildfire, _if it saves one life, then it’s worth it Mister Stark. That’s all. _

Tony should have know what the kid would do.  
  


* * *

  
The silence that follows a hurricane is a terrifying thing, filled with the sense of mourning that follows a loss so all encompassing that you know you would never recover. This is that silence.

Tony had spent five years grieving over the child he had lost, the son he had been too scared to love openly, for fear of rejection and betrayal, for fear of being unwanted. He had never regretted anything so much. Nothing had ever come close- nothing but this.

Because standing in the epicentre of the battle, staring up at Thanos with beautiful, fierce, _stupid_ refusal burning in his eyes, was Peter. 

There is a gauntlet on his hand.

* * *

Those surrounding this last moment have paused- the Avengers had broken long ago, but this was the final fracturing. This was the disintegration.

Everything they could’ve been, everything they could’ve become, it had all died with Peter’s last victorious smile.


End file.
